As the complexity of telecommunications networks continues to grow, the level of required reliability and availability of the networks continues to rise correspondingly. These factors place an increasing burden on diagnostic systems that are used to isolate and correct network problems. For network service providers, quick and accurate problem diagnosis and correction is critically important.
Telecommunications networks typically have many elements, these elements being grouped into nodes. Each node contains one or more shelves, and each shelf contains one or more optical processing elements. An example of an optical processing element is a line card for a shelf, such as a WDM optical line card, which accepts as an interface a WDM optical fiber. The optical processing elements on a node are connected to other optical equipment, other optical processing elements within the same node, or other optical processing elements on another node. By connecting optical processing elements using optical fibers between different nodes, an optical network is formed.
A common objective of the optical network is to carry traffic in the form of optically encoded binary data. A service, in this context, can be defined as the ability to carry this traffic from one point to another in the optical network. The optical network generally supports more than one service.
Typically, problems arising in telecommunications networks are often expressed in the form of alarms. An alarm can generally be considered to be an event reported by a network element when an abnormal condition exists. Upon receiving the alarm, the network management system displays the alarm in a list of alarms on the operator's console, where each entry provides information such as the affected network entity and the type and seriousness of the alarm.
When alarms occur in the network, they impair the ability to successfully carry traffic, or in the worst case, cause all traffic to stop.
In a typical network management environment, a heterogeneous array of switching and transmission equipment may produce hundreds of alarms each day. The operator's console often shows alarms that are spurious, transient, time correlated, or too numerous to be handled at the same time. This causes fault diagnosis and correction to be a complex and error-prone task, where considerable experience is required to interpret and isolate network faults in an accurate and time-efficient manner.
Accordingly, there is a need in the telecommunications industry for further development of a method that provides more rapid and accurate fault diagnosis and correction than currently existing solutions.